Is International Women’s Day Creating A Gender-Balanced World?

Every March we celebrate International Women’s Month. It’s a time to empower and celebrate girls and women, adding layers of progress onto years of struggle. We remember and recognize women’s contributions to historic and current events. Feminists and allies spend March shouting-out those women who perhaps didn’t feel brave enough to shout at all, but led with courage regardless towards equal rights and a more gender-balanced world.

International Women’s Day (IWD), is March 8th, and the theme is #BalanceforBetter. A more balanced and fair world is a better one, but what happens when the conversation eliminates certain voices, and fails to elevate the third plate of the scale?

I am a nonbinary person.

My gender identity is neither male nor female; I feel like a perfect mix of both. I use they/them pronouns. You may call me Mx. Leventry, but I am no one’s ma’am, sir, Ms., or Mr. I used female pronouns and was called a woman for 37 years, but I am not a woman, and I am masculine, but I am not a man. I am technically transgender because my gender assignment at birth (female) based on my sexual anatomy (female) does not align with my gender identity. While I love some of my feminine characteristics, I hate my female body. And while I love being trans masculine, I don’t carry the toxic characteristics that many men either subconsciously or very consciously embody.

I fully support and will celebrate International Women’s Day, but it doesn’t seem like space is made for my inclusion in it. How do we meet the goal of balance when pieces are missing? A gender-balanced world can’t exist if the world is continuously seen as one with only two genders. Gender is not binary; it is fluid, and without practices, language, and understanding to support this, equality cannot exist.

Transgender men, nonbinary folks—no matter their gender expression or sexual anatomy—and transgender women need to be included in Women’s History Month and IWD.

Anyone with lived experience as a woman needs to be able to knock on the door of equity and equality and demand to be let in.

I think there is a fear that if the door is opened to more identities, then the focus will shift from what people believe is the main, and traditionally binary, objective. But outliers do not take away from the focus; we can bring it back to center. Diversity is often at the core of solutions. In my case, as a nonbinary person and a gender outlier, I am not looking to take away from any feminist movement. I am simply looking for safe spaces among people who understand my struggle for visibility and equality.

Inclusion is a powerful and necessary tool for success in both personal and professional goals. Nonbinary and transgender voices are quick to amplify female voices. We need female voices to amplify us too.

Here’s the thing: the world has seen me and treated me like a woman.

I have a female perspective. Transgender women are real women; they don’t need a pussy to match your pussy hat to know the world is harder for women. And transgender men have pushed and pulled their way out of people’s perception of what it means to be female while pushing and pulling their way into being seen as male while fighting against society’s idea of what that means too. They deserve welcoming too, if they consider International Women’s Day a safe space to thrive.

Straight allies have advocated for LGBTQ rights; white law makers have pushed for racial equality. And the truth is that men, the really good ones who have known all along that women deserve more than what has been offered, have made space for women. Oh, women have fought. Women have screamed. Women have won. But they were outliers once too. We are making space for them.

And now it’s time for women to make space for those of us standing on the perimeter of what feels like sacred, but exclusive territory.

We can’t create a gender-balanced world without recognizing that third plate, that third point in the triangle—a symbol that coincidentally represents femininity.

When women can empower themselves and others for the better, even if the identities of others are outside of the cisgender definition of being female, they can create a more balanced and equal world.

Amber Leventry is a queer, nonbinary writer and advocate. They live in Vermont and have three kids, including twins and a transgender daughter. Amber’s writing appears on The Washington Post, Ravishly, Grown and Flown, Longreads, The Next Family, and Sammiches & Psych Meds. They are a staff writer for Scary Mommy. They also run Family Rhetoric by Amber Leventry, a Facebook page devoted to advocating for LGBTQ families one story at a time.
Amber works with schools to make curriculum LGBTQ inclusive and affirming and have spoken on panels and taught workshops to help people become better informed allies.
Follow them on Twitter and [email protected] And visit their website to hire them for speaking engagements and LGBTQ training sessions.

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MAY 6-8, 2020 • Los Angeles, California
AN OPEN CONVERSATION BETWEEN MOMS + MARKETERS + MEDIA
Mom 2.0 is a gathering of influencers and leaders who create content online and on air in parenting, entertainment, food, politics, business, marketing, technology, social change, travel and design.